1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a product placement engine system and method that analyzes a document such as a web page to extract information regarding the content of the document, and identify any relevant products or services that relate to the document.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is a worldwide network of computers linked together by various hardware communication links all running a standard suite of protocols known as TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol). The growth of the Internet over the last several years has been explosive, fueled in the most part by the widespread use of software viewers known as browsers and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) which allow a simple GUI (graphical user interface) to be used to communicate over the Internet. Browsers generally reside on the computer used to access content on the Internet, i.e. the client computer. HTTP is a component of TCP/IP and provides users access to files of various formats using a standard page description language known as HTML (hypertext markup language), XML (extensible markup language), and XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language). The collection of servers on the Internet using HTTP has become known as the “World Wide Web” or simply the “web.”
Through HTML, XHTML, and interactive programming protocols, the author of a particular web page is able to make information available to viewers of the web page by placing the web page on an Internet web server. A client computer running a browser can request and display a web page stored on a web server by issuing a URL request through the Internet to the web in a known manner. Such a web page typically incorporates both textural and graphical information including embedded hyper-text links and/or embedded applets, written in Java™ or another programming language.
As known and appreciated in the art, there are presently millions of web pages with various content. Tools have been developed to allow the user to search these web pages to obtain the various web pages having the various content of interest. One way to locate the desired web pages is to use a “search engine” which will search for web pages having a particular keyword or keywords. When a user seeking information from the web types in a keyword(s) in a search field of the search engine, the search engine's software program then utilizes algorithmic functions and criteria to find keyword matches in the information stored in the databases. The software program then sorts through the results of the search and provides a prioritized set of results to the user based on relevancy of the web page. Various search engine software programs differ in their methods used for determining a web page's relevancy. For example, the software may view the “meta tag” of the page, include a counter for counting the number of keyword occurrences on the text of the page, and/or consider the web page's popularity as well as other factors such as whether the webmaster of the web page has made special arrangements to have the web page displayed as a result of the search.
One of the primary applications of the web has been for shopping, i.e. the purchase of goods and services, i.e. products. Virtually every major commercial “bricks and mortar” merchant has established a web site for the showcase and sale of their products. Furthermore, many manufacturers sell products directly over the web. Finally, a plethora of on-line merchants, not previously existing in the bricks and mortar world, have come into existence. As a result, virtually every product is available for purchase over the web from a plurality of merchants. This situation has increased the efficiency of markets by permitting shoppers to readily compare products and terms of sale from plural merchants without the need to travel physically to the merchant locations.
Presently, when a consumer accesses a merchant's web site to research a particular product, only information regarding the particular product being researched is provided. Although the consumer may desire to research and identify an alternative product similar to the particular product being researched, tools for facilitating identification of such products are generally not available. For example, to obtain information regarding an alternative product in merchant websites, the consumer is typically required to display a listing of all of the products in a particular category, and to select an product to thereby display detailed information regarding the selected product. However, this selection is done by the consumer without information as to whether the newly selected product is comparable to the researched product.
Some merchant websites such as www.bestbuy.com provide a boxed window that may be entitled “Also Consider” or the like which identifies an alternative product for the consumer's consideration in a page displaying detailed information regarding a product that was selected by the consumer. The identified product is implemented as a link which may be selected by the consumer to obtain detailed information regarding the product. However, the boxed window is implemented to merely identify products offered by the same manufacturer of the originally selected product, and identifies products having nearly identical specification that may only differ nominally, for example, color of the trim, or to a product from the same manufacturer having increased capacity of a particular feature, for example, memory capacity.
Furthermore, the product that is identified to the user is typically manually linked to the web page displaying the originally selected product. This manual linking of one page to another is time consuming and a certain level of knowledge and experience is required for the administrator or other personnel to select an appropriate product that is truly comparable to the selected product. Such requirements further increase the cost for identifying such products.
The above described merchandizing technique depends also on the targeted web page being already discretely tied to a particular product, which product forms the basis of matching and comparison. In practice, many other web pages would be acceptable venues for associated merchandizing. However, most web pages do not have any particular product associated thereto or have any products mentioned at all in the web page. If there is no product that is associated to a web page, the product specification-based matching and comparison is entirely non-applicable. For example, the web page may be a review of a concert by a rock band. Because there are no products in the web page, presently known methods for product specification-based matching and comparison cannot be applied. However, such a web page would still be an appropriate venue for associated merchandizing for products related to music, for example, an MP3 player.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,122,647 to Horowitz et al. discloses a system, method, and software product that create contextual hypertext links relevant to a user selected portion of a source document. The contextual links enable the user to dynamically associate the source document with any available target document, regardless of whether links were created between the source document and the target document when the source document was created. The method includes selecting terms relevant to the user selected portion by linguistic analysis which selects the most frequently occurring terms. From the selected terms, target documents relevant to the selected terms are identified. The target documents are selected by identifying topics that are associated with, or described by, the selected terms. Contextual links are created between the selected terms and target documents associated with the identified topics using the URLs for the documents in the contextual links. The system includes a knowledge base of topics, including hierarchical relations between topics, and associations of topics and terms. A document collection includes documents and references to documents, and URL or other addressing information for the documents. A tagging module receives a user selected portion and selects terms to be used for the contextual links. A presentation module identifies the topics in the knowledge base associated with the selected terms, the documents associated with each topic, and creates the hypertext links between the terms and the documents.
Presently, no systems or methods are available for substantially automatically identifying relevant products that can be associated to the content of a web page document, especially if there are no products associated to the web page document. Therefore, there exists an unfulfilled need for a system and method for minimizing the above noted disadvantages associated with present systems and methods for identifying relevant products. In addition, there exists an unfulfilled need for such a system and method that minimizes cost and can perform these tasks substantially automatically with minimal input from the administrator or other personnel, and that can do so even where there is no prior associated product for the web page document.